Social Media & WordPress

WordPress is an ideal Content Management System (CMS) for building websites that intergrate with your Social Media accounts.  There are literally hundreds of WordPress Plugins and Widgets that provide functionality with the ever growing number of Social Networking Sites (often referred to as Web 2.0 sites).

The scale of the opportunity for integration is huge; plugins range from a simple Twitter feed on your site of your own Tweets, through to full broadcasting of all you site content to hundreds of Web 2.0 (Social) sites around the globe. It’s important to note that social media traffic can go two ways;  information from the Social Networks to display on your site for your readers; and information from your site can be posted manually or more likely, automatically to the Social Sites.  This second method has the opportunity to drive visitors back to your site when they click on the links.  It should also be mentioned that either directional traffic, can have a positive SEO effect on you sites rankings.

The most notable and popular sites at the moment are probably Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn; any of these sites can be used with multiple accounts, either business, personal or both, although LinkedIn is more widely recognised as a business networking site.  These four represent a good starting point for Social Media integration with your WordPress site.

• LinkedIn has a built-in application, written by Automattic, (the people behind WordPress) that can pick up the posts (rss feed) from your WordPress web site and display them on your Profile in LinkedIn.

• Twitter Example:
  The Twitter feed on the right hand side of this page, not only pulls in Tweets from my business Twitter account ‘@thetotal‘, it also feeds Tweets from other selected accounts, ‘@name’, or Tweets containing specific keywords in the form of ‘HashTags #’.

• Facebook Example:
  ‘Facebook Badges’; a simple way to place your Facebook presence on your own site or blog.  Badges can be created, for Pages, Profiles, Photos and applications.

• YouTube Example:
  ‘Embed codes’ in different sizes are available directly from YouTube, allowing you to display either your own or complimentary videos.
  

Using a WordPress Site as your Main Hub it is possible to automatically feed your Social Media accounts.

For further information on Social Media integration, please email, info@thetotal.net